A new documentary chronicles how a young Black girl named Amsa and a Black Lives Matter protest inadvertently exposed deep-seated racism in her small, predominantly white town of Lynden, Washington.
She and her fellow protestors were met with counter protesters who carried guns and taunted the teenager and her supporters as they marched by peacefully and made speeches.
The documentary, Lynden, was released on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV in September. As The New York Times reported, Amsa received death threats, and a social media post suggested trees near the center of town would be good for hangings.
The Black Wall Street Times spoke to co-director Bryan Tucker.
As Amsa told her story to gathered protestors, Tucker stated, “counter protesters were shouting at her and just trying to drown out her voice and trying to distract her.”
“The march itself was explosive and really tense” said Tucker.
Part of the documentary shows Amsa returning to her homeland in Ethiopia. Tucker remarked, “after talking to Amsa through our interviews, part of her transformation that led to her wanting to do this racial justice march in Lynden was this experience she had going back to Ethiopia.” He continued, “she was able to reconnect with her birth family and be in a country where she didn’t feel like she stood out skin-color wise.”
Lynden is a town full of churches and religious leaders. “We were expecting a lot more pastors to show up at a reconciliation event where they were going to allow Amsa to share her story unencumbered, but only two pastors showed up.”
He continued, “So give them credit for showing up, they said some wonderful things in front of everybody and I captured those and then we followed up with them because what they said at that event was that they wanted to use their position to be a part of the healing and moving forward in the town.”
Tucker explained, “Lynden’s always been conservative. It’s always been heavily evangelical. And there’s a proud Dutch history in Lynden. It’s one thing to be white and to fit in Lynden, but it’s another thing to be Dutch, the Dutch Pride goes deep. There’s a saying in Lynden, ‘if you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.'”
Speaking about a July 2020 “March for Black Lives” rally, Tucker noted, “I was on edge at the March, because that was my first time spending time in Lynden, and that was the first thing I filmed. My co-director grew up in Lynden and he has roots in Lynden so he was a little bit more familiar.”
Tucker also noted a rally in November 2020 just four days after the election,”You see that in the film, at that point it was four days after the 2020 election. It was clear that Biden had won, but Trump was not giving up. And so that’s why there are all these ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies everywhere across the country.”
“I was very nervous for Amsa and told her ‘you need to stay right by me.’ There was me, my co-director, and one of our producers there filming. So it was three of us guys, I said, ‘stay by any one of us. I don’t want anything happening to you.'”
While the “Stop the Steal” rally in Lynden remained peaceful, Tucker had heard from a source that some Lynden residents attended the rally in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, though he was never able to confirm it.
Asked what he hopes the viewing public takes away from the documentary, he responded, “listen to people when they tell you their experiences. Every time I watch our film and I see Amsa trying to give her speech and people resort to this childlike, ‘I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear like your experience of racism in our town.’ Listen to people and trust that they have a different experience from you. It’s really simple.”